Culture shock can make you a better thinker

New York: Culture shocks that result from migrating to a different country or accepting a refugee from other countries, can actually make us better thinkers, says an interesting study.

People are more likely to think and behave mindlessly - buying things, eating more and performing poorly on cognitive reasoning tests when they encounter a cultural situation that meets their expectations, said the study.

The researchers referred to these situations as moments of "cultural fluency." "Culture sets up a general blueprint for the way things should work,

so that if things unfold as we expect, we do not have to think," said study corresponding author Daphna Oyserman, from University of Southern California in the US.

The opposite is true for people confronted with moments of "cultural disfluency". People encountering cultural gaffes flex their brains more and perform better on cognitive reasoning tests and are less likely to succumb to impulse purchases and consumption, the researchers said.

"We are used to thinking about culture shock as negative and something that happens to those who move, but the disfluency that results in culture shock has some positive consequences for thinking," Oyserman pointed out.